Stop and search
Charles Moore
rryke and Temper are Lakeland terriers. .1 At the age of 12 weeks, Temper proved her prowess by going off without invitation and finding a hole with a dog-fox inside it. Since then she has joined Tyke in all the adventures of the hunt. When I meet them, they are in their wired box on the top of the quad-bike, and with them is Nellie, chaperoning her four-month-old daughters, Trimmer and Tidy. As with the human personality, so with the canine — the smaller the fiercer. These dogs are very small.
It is early in the morning and we are earth-stopping. The idea is that the terrier
men identify all the earths in the country to be hunted that day. If these are badgers' setts they must be left alone, but otherwise the mouths of the earths may be stopped. Before this is done, Tyke and Temper and Nellie sniff around for a fox (and Tidy and Trimmer follow, rolling around and biting one another when there's nothing else to do). If they smell one, they point, and then they enter the earth in order to drive the fox from his lair. When hounds are chasing deer and should be chasing foxes, you can tell by the higher note of their baying. With terriers, it works the other way round. A deep bark denotes a badger and means they must be called off at once. A fierce, high yapping means they've found Charlie.
Muffin drives the quad-bike. I have mentioned Muffin before. Although fit, he is more or less round and appears to have almost no legs. With his jerkin and his erratic teeth, his unshaven face and the mud all over him, he looks like something mediaeval and frightening from an Ingmar Bergman film. 'Antis' tend to flee from Muffin into the next county. He gave up being a gamekeeper at the age of 21 to spend more time with his passion, and now he is in charge of our knackering and of the terriers. He works always with Foxy Dave, a thin, wiry former Londoner, who drives the other quad-bike and fantasises about bloody fates that might befall Tony Blair. They are assisted by young Barry, schoolfriend of Foxy Dave's son.
As the quad-bike rolls over tussocks and bracken, Muffin chats. One day when he was a boy, our huntsman in the Vale of Tears (VT) let him try blowing the horn, and ever since then hunting has been his life. When we gave a party before the Liberty and Livelihood March, he kindly agreed to come to London to blow the horn for it even though 'I don't agree with cities and I don't agree with trains'. He looks at nature with a sanguinary eye. When a heron flies over, he explains how delicious its breast is after being soaked in vinegar for a night. When we pass a woman riding one fell pony and leading another, he looks at the beasts and mutters, 'Two weeks' grub for me 'ounds.'
Although a good-natured man, Muffin puts human beings second in his mental world. He reminisces happily: 'We had a lovely day's duck-fighting here last year. At the end of the day, though, one of the lads drowned. That cut the atmosphere a bit.'
Last week, in marshier country, they found eight brace of foxes with the dogs, but here, in this overshot, higher ground, it is tougher. At our second stop, though, Nellie hurries into a hole. Muffin lies down and pushes his face inside it, so that his bulk spreads, large and somehow appalling in its headlessness, over the sward. Soon the muffled noise of Nellie's bark signals the fox. Dave pulls out a 'locator', which picks up a signal from Nellie's collar and registers her depth. Then he plunges a bar into the ground to search for the underground pas sage and starts digging. The passage is so narrow that Nellie is pulled out by her back legs and the smaller Tyke substituted. Now Muffin shoves his head right down into the five-foot hole, leaving his stomach and legs vertical like Winnie the Pooh when stuck. All to no avail: the fox is tucked up under the roots of a hornbeam and cannot be reached. We leave it for later.
At the next earth, Nellie hesitates in a way which leads Muffin to state that there is something other than a fox beneath. Temper pushes on, however, and Muffin once more sticks his face to the door of the earth. There is a sudden movement: out bursts a rabbit and hits Muffin smack in the eye before hurtling away. The pleasure this gives us onlookers almost makes up for the lack of foxes.
Back at the meet, we celebrate the 87th birthday of Atalanta. She first came out with us mounted in 1926, and today she is on a little stallion. We photograph her with Annie, who is two, and also mounted. There can't be many sports where the active participants can be separated by 85 years. We haven't the heart to tell the birthday girl that we haven't found anything for her in the woods.
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